It's 8:30pm and you're about to sit down with your favourite TV show when you decide that a nice a cup of tea and a biscuit would make it a perfect evening.

You head off to the kitchen, boil the kettle, then check out which biscuit(s) will tickle your fancy tonight.
To avoid having to get up again half way through the show, it'll be a lot easier if you just take the whole pack into the lounge with you.

And so it begins.

A little later the pack's empty and you feel like crap!

Rinse & repeat with the wrong foods in the wrong quantities at the wrong times and before long you're hating the fat bastard staring back at you from the mirror.

You've spent most of your adult life applying willpower to a whole range of situations, but now you're wondering how in the hell you allowed yourself to be ambushed by the idiot in the mirror. The idiot who somewhere along the line lost all semblance of self-control over food - at a time when it mattered most!

It doesn't have to be biscuits of course, it could be beer, MacDonald's [insert yours] chips, ice cream etc. - once you start listening to the little voice inside when it tells you it's OK to have "one more" - you're a goner !

Well that's my story, or at least a small part of it.

Let's hope your story is different, however, given current obesity stats there's a better than even chance you already know what I'm talking about - or you will one day, unless of course you're smarter and more careful than I've been over the last 5 or 6 years.

I'd already done a couple of short juice fasts 7 or 8 years ago and had really enjoyed the benefits, but moving house a few times seemed to put an end to my experimenting. Because of this, juicing slipped into the realm of just another thing I'd done whilst trying to find my "healthy groove".

When I first heard about "Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead" almost a year ago, I realised that Joe had gone so much further than I ever did, in fact a 60 day fast when I was playing around with it was considered really "out there" unless you were some kind of Buddhist monk.

Joe's story fascinated me, especially the realisation that you could not only survive, but actually flourish by consuming only juice for such a long time

So I toddled off to Woolworths at Baulkham Hills feeling all fired up, only to discover that they'd already sold out of the FSND kits! I tried a few more stores and even phoned their head office, but they'd been caught out by the demand and were out of stock everywhere. They said they'd be back in stock in a few weeks and I should try then.

I went online and found jointhereboot.com but it still seemed like a new site and they weren't quite ready to ship product at that time. So of course as happens all too often, the idea slipped away as I continued dealing with all the other stuff that life puts in front of us every day.

Despite my lack of focus on the whole juice fast/feast idea, Joe's story never quite left me. Then one day about a week ago (22nd August 2012), whilst looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across Tim Buchalka's story on YouTube about his 60 day juice fast, having himself been inspired by "Fat Sick & Nearly Dead", for me - actually watching Tim's transformation was a game changer!

Another layer of this story involves my lovely daughter in law, Elsja. She'd had an ongoing gastro problem which hadn't been resolved by an assortment of doctors over the years, so she'd started an extended elimination diet some weeks earlier.

I was so impressed and proud of her, especially her determination to stick with such a difficult process for so long to try and figure out what the underlying cause of her problem was. Of course her strength and commitment then made me question my own character when it came to doing what was necessary to improve the quality of my own life.

Sadly I'd lent her the expensive but hardly used juicer I'd bought several years ago, never thinking that within a few weeks I'd be planning on using it again!

I knew that if I mentioned my plan, both Elsja and Andrew (my son) would insist on returning it to me, but I just couldn't deprive her of it when she was doing so well. There was nothing else to do but secretly buy a new one!

During (a lot of) research I discovered that because I was planning an extended juice fast, I'd need to be drinking mostly green juice, which meant that a slow, cold press masticating juicer was a much better option.

After a bit of shopping around, I ordered the Omega VRT350HD from the US which arrived just 5 days later

It was a lot cheaper than buying it here in Oz, but the postage was a real killer, howeverrrrr, since I won't be paying for cigarettes every day, the new juicer should be paid for in under a month!

Around eight years ago I quit smoking cold-turkey, that lasted two and a half years then I literally forced myself to restart because of the 10kgs of blubber I'd put on after quitting. I've also juice fasted for 7 days a couple of times before and made it through those as well...

..but I've never tried to do both at the same time.

After the way I've been [sarcasm] "taking care" [/sarcasm], of my body for the last few years, especially the bad eating habits I've allowed to creep into my lifestyle, I'm expecting that most of the first week will be detox hell!

I've read that the body stores a lot of retained toxins in fat cells, and that when fat is burned for fuel, especially during a cleansing fast, how utterly crap you feel is directly related to the size of your toxic storage reserves.

Well these days I have plenty of toxic storage space, and I've no doubt that my lifestyle has provided an over abundance of little toxic residents who will need prying loose with a crowbar to evict them from their cozy little squats!

In fact just thinking about all the horrible junk food gunk locked away is making me feel ill, plus who knows how much more yuk is in storage from all the cigarettes I've smoked - it's going to be a fun first week - not!

My reading also tells me that I need to prepare for the fast by eating more fresh produce along with juices during the few days leading uo to Saturday - makes sense of course, but how do I prepare to quit smoking?

If you're interested in what's going on here, or maybe you just enjoy watching an idiot suffer, why not check out my day-to-day progress as I (try to) document every taste, symptom and emotion experienced as I work my way through this double challenge.click for updates →